Using DSPs for its AMZL delivery service, so goes Amazon's "guaranteed" deliveries

 

I know there are terrible things going on in the world today, but I’ve already spoken of why they are happening, hypocrisy from Trumpists be damned. Meanwhile, life goes on, and there is something I just have to get off my chest.

Two months ago I was waiting on the three Amazon packages to be delivered by its Amazon Logistics “specialists,” or what they call a “delivery service partner.” One of them was already a day late. These DSPs are hired out from third-party companies to drive those gray “Prime” vans, or those who drive their own POVs.  Amazon equips these drivers with a GPS tracking system for customers so that they can track where the driver is, although it is only activated when there are nine stops to go. Of course anyone who has followed this “guidance” in the expectation that they can actually gauge when a package will be delivered knows this it being too optimistic.  

The following screenshot was taken at 5:47 PM, almost eight hours into the delivery. The blue dot indicates where I happened to encounter the Prime van sitting between 2 and 2:30 PM—just a stone’s throw across the street from the delivery location. The green dot is where the driver was now:

 

By 7:01 PM, it was clear that something was “confused,” as the driver had moved even further away:

 

7:17 PM: when you are told this between “stops,” that means the driver is completely lost:

 

7:44 PM: There is this all too common message these days, which may have been just a random time the lost driver imputed to fake a delivery attempt:

 

 

The “issue”--besides operator headspace--was that as both the permanent and written delivery instructions stated, the business this was to be delivered to closed at 7 PM. Deliveries are made to this location every day; shouldn’t someone have gotten the “message” by now, presuming they know how to read?  This past June, CNN Business published a story about Amazon renting drivers for their “last mile” deliveries, although it was too forgiving of the drivers for the mounting complaints by customers you can find on message boards on the Internet.  Amazon’s delivery service (AMZL) has ballooned so far out of control that there isn’t even the slightest effort at accountability.

 

DSP drivers wear uniforms provided by Amazon, but they technically are not Amazon employees—meaning they are not subject to Amazon’s habit of firing employees who they say have succumbed to “mediocrity” and need to be replaced. Of course Amazon makes bold claims for its logistics services, but the fact is it is getting worse and worse, as those online comment pages will tell you. This week alone, I have two packages delivered a day late, and another is two days late—if it ever is delivered at all. The new Amazon DSP point in Tukwila, WA has become a Twilight Zone of lost packages and late deliveries to Seattle customers. Delivery routes are supposedly “programmed” into the driver’s app, but as indicated in the previous delivery example, it all depends on the competence of the driver, or person “programming” the delivery—that is, if the package even gets on the van at all.

 

I don’t want to hear about “disgruntled” drivers who sit in their vans for a half-hour or an hour trying to figure out where they are supposed to go to next, if in fact that is what they are doing. They don’t read customer delivery instructions until they arrive at a location, if they do at all—which is pointless if the instruction is about delivery times and the driver is already late. Drivers grumble about instructions that include customer complaints about previous failed deliveries; I guess I’m not alone.

 

Claims in the CNN story that DSP drivers are expected to make deliveries every 36 seconds or 250 stops in 10 hours has to be pure bullshit when you see drivers just sitting in their vans for a half-hour or hour, or the GPS shows them in the same spot for that amount of time. The complaint that incompetently programmed routes make their day longer—often forcing them to double back to locations they had passed hours ago, or send them down the wrong way on one-way streets—indicates that Amazon logistics is just a shit-show all around.

 

And, of course, because DSP’s are not unionized, driver turnover is “high,” and every week (if not every day) the likelihood that deliveries are made by people unfamiliar with the terrain is high. And don’t expect any “assistance” from Amazon Logistics “customer service.” They are only there to be a sounding board for angry customers; they can’t do anything to locate a “lost in transit” package, or expedite a “found” package’s delivery.

 

Of course it isn’t all the fault of the “prime” drivers. After all, packages have to arrive at the warehouse to start with. Remember Amazon’s “guaranteed” delivery date? You don’t see that notification anymore. The bigger Amazon has become, the more the attitude is “you get it when you get it.” Before so-called Prime service, you got what you paid for with the shipping charge, and if they didn’t deliver packages as promised, you always had alternatives. “Prime” service, which is basically an annual lump sum paid for “free” shipping, is cheap if you order a lot of items, but the catch is that Amazon has more control over the what, whens are wheres. If you hate their AMZL delivery service, well tough bananas.

People may boycott Amazon for a little while and shop somewhere else, but they always come back expecting things to change, but they never do. As noted earlier, I have 2 packages that were delivered a day late and a third two days late, and probably won’t arrive at all because it got “lost” in the 20-minute drive between SeaTac and Tukwila. With any other retailer, if you called customer service about a problem, it could be fixed right then. With Amazon, you are directed to a call center in India, where the person you talk to only knows what you can read yourself; they are only good for two things: offering to cancel or replace an item. They can’t tell you the whens, whys, or wheres about a package, and they can’t contact anyone who can find something “lost in transit.”

Customers who constantly deal with late packages may wonder what the hell is going on. The recent New York Times investigation reported an “unusually high” rate of turnover at Amazon warehouses—150 percent a year. What does that mean? It means that the average warehouse employee lasts about 8 months on the job, and this, we are told, is by “design.” Jeff Bezos in fact designed it this way; his attitude is that because lower-end, lower-wage warehouse workers who have no opportunity for advancement are inherently “lazy,” this creates a “stagnant workforce” that leads to “mediocrity.”

In a UK investigative program where an Amazon employee was equipped with a body cam in a non-automated warehouse, workers had to push around heavy carts and carry handheld devices that set times—literally seconds—between each item pickup; burnout in such an environment is a given. Even in automated environments, it’s a race against time when every move is monitored and recorded. There are penalties for not reaching targets (getting fired), and no reward for exceeding targets (save for not getting fired). Amazon benefits are supposed to be “great,” but hardly anyone has a chance to use them before they either leave out of frustration, or are terminated.

According to the Times, there is no “human” in Amazon’s human resources department; it is totally automated, and it might takes months for a request to be considered “elevated” enough for an actual human to be bothered with it. The Times noted that the completely automated “HR” department often mistakenly terminated employees on authorized leave, and notified former employees who had been fired for things like “behavioral” issues that they were supposed to report for work.

Amazon apparently loses 3 percent of its workforce every week, and to “fulfill” it growing labor needs, even with automation, every year it needs 5 percent of the entire U.S. available workforce to apply for a job there. And it isn’t particularly hard to get a job at Amazon either, in fact, it requires little more than just showing up. I could have gotten a job there myself if I actually wanted to. A few years ago I filled out their online application, after which I was informed that I was in their hiring queue. After about six months I forgot about it, and then I received an email telling me to show up at some Seattle community center. There I hung with a crowd of other people, watched an introductory video presentation, did a quick drug test, had my picture taken for an ID card, selected a preferred shift schedule, and was told to wait for further instructions.

Those came two weeks later, when I was told to appear at a Kent facility. I actually had a night job that wasn’t too stressful, I could work mostly alone and the pay and benefits were OK, so it wasn’t a hard decision to make one way or the other, particularly given that video from the UK facility that I had seen. Of course if I didn’t already have a job I would have shown up, but in retrospect it wouldn’t have been a good idea given the revolving-door nature of employment there.

Unfortunately, Amazon won’t attempt to become more reliable in its shipping service until it has more effective competition. Other retailers offer “free” or low-cost shipping, but there you get what you pay for. It wouldn’t be so egregious if Amazon wasn’t running on the fumes of its prior reputation and didn’t make promises it couldn’t keep; all it does now is make excuses for not keeping them.